Heidegger: Being Seen Through the Lens of Presence and Mediation

Imagine
the following situation. A foreigner from a non-western country walks
out of a store holding a frisbee. However, he tells you, it's a
dinner plate. Later, at his house, as he is actually eating food from
the frisbee, perhaps the object could genuinely be considered a
plate. This sort of dilemma - how one and the same material object
could be conceived of differently by different people - is the
perfect case study for Heidegger's philosophical approach. Heidegger
shifts away from the traditional Aristotelian philosophical project
of explaining the various types of objects in the world and their
qualities and classifications to focus on frameworks of meaning that
subordinate objects to human concerns.

Objects Defined by Presence and Concern

Appropriately
enough, when Heidegger discusses what we come across in our day to
day encounters with the real world, is it not objects but
meaningfulness or significance. Heidegger's concept of presence
(parousia in Greek, das Anwesende in German) refers to what is near
to our hearts and minds, what we really care about as we come across
it. Indeed this is a powerful insight that accommodates the
psychological aspects of human life. For example, classical
object-oriented philosophy would discuss your encounter with the
table in narrow terms. It might ask the question about how your mind
has come to acquire the general concept/idea of a table and was able
to combine the various mostly visual sensual impressions with the
mental powers to identify the table. However, Heidegger's approach
would ask completely different questions about the table. He would
ask what the table means to your life and what are your usage
patterns of it. That is because how a table "appears" to you is what it "is" to you. If it is a part of your routine of reading, then the
table serves for you as a prop to a ritual of gathering
information or imagining invented stories. Or perhaps for a child
jumping up and down the table, it's all about his exploration of
physical feats and a higher awareness of his body's potential.

Thus,
a central concept for Heidegger's philosophy is the world, a context
of human interests and purposes that gives meaning to objects.
Heidegger associates being with parousia, the study of the presence
of objects as sources of meaning as opposed to Aristotle's ousia, the
study of the realness of whatever is real. Aristotle's project was
understanding the material and non-material aspects of both living
and non-living beings, but Heidegger thought that Aristotle only
managed to explore the properties of existent things (to on in Greek,
meaning whatever is) without defining what being itself is. For
Heidegger, to understand being was not to understand the properties
of objects (an ontic investigation of to on) but to understand how
these objects could become intelligible and meaningful to a human
being (i..e an ontological investigation.)

Possibilities and Meaning Arise Out of Context

Despite
adopting a set of aims that contrast with Aristotle's own, Heidegger
does appropriate Aristotelian teleology to show how purpose in human
behavior endows objects with meaning. Imagine, for whatever reason, a
man decides to pretend to be a woman's new husband for the benefit of
her circle of friends. This does sound like some plot out of a zany
comedy, perhaps one that will eventually lead the two to fall in love
and actually get married at the end. However, as they play husband
and wife for the benefit of onlookers, they might just end up sharing
a lot of hugs, kisses, and all kinds of caresses, affectionate
gestures, and loving words. This is the perfect example of how the
social context - in this case, the expectations of what a married
couple should act like - shapes the behavior of two individuals who
are confronted with the institution of marriage.

Thus,
a context of a life, a world, places things in meaning and associates
these things with possible uses. Hence, for a woman, the body of her
new husband becomes a field of potential affections, a lot of them
drawn from those typical things married people are supposed to. The
fakely married couple draws their potential of affectionate actions not from their innate feelings towards each other - which
they do not have - but rather from a body of knowledge of married
people behavior they have come to absorb from other people
and media sources such film and television. This is why a dance style
frequently featured on television can spread quickly beyond the
social milieu where it originated to faraway lands. But it's not just
the moves themselves that will be spreading. Even the "typical"
behavior patterns around the dance styles will be adopted. A song
danced to by a couple during a sentimental romantic moment in a film may
come to be used for that exact purpose in the society at large. Thus,
a world or a life context is not merely a passive reflection on the
meaningful "presence" of objects already embedded into our
purposes and intentions but also an active force that "presences"
and establishes links of meaningfulness to objects.

Disclosure of Meaning Depends on the State of Mind

To
describe the process of presencing, Heidegger here uses the metaphor
of the Greek word "aletheia" - disclosure that allows to merge things out
of hiding so that they become clear and visible. Then, once we have a
specific intention/purpose in mind, a light shines on these objects
taking them out of the darkness of indetermination and endowing them
with clarity and intelligibility. As a group is walking through a
park, the objects of nature fade into the background and don't mean
much of anything at all. (The objects in their occurrent state
without meaning are vorhanden - merely occurrent. Only once woven
into a web of meaning are they zuhanden - ready at hand/for use)
However, once the group decides to play a series of competitive
games, they see that little pebbles can be flung into the water as
part of a throwing contest, uphill paths are racing tracks to test
their running endurance. If you enter the territory of a tribe, by
communicating with the locals you will come to learn that the local
places and things are settings and props for activities and rituals
that you would not have conceived of on your own based on the traditions
of your culture.

Achieving the Goal of Binding Objects into a Web of Meaning is an Act that is Recurrent but Never Final

However,
it must be emphasized that immersing objects in the water of meaning
is not a final act as they never transcend their status as
entities malleable to a diverse set of contexts and purposes. The
open field of things never exhausts its potential by becoming closed and
conclusively transformed into a world of significance. A notebook sold at a supplies store is supposed to be written upon and likely will once bought. But its pages could also be shredded and turned into confetti for a
party or be used as a sort of a paper towel to wipe off water or
liquid. Now in Aristotle's approach to objects and purpose, there is
a sort of finality in play. He conceives of telos as an an underlying
idea that guides objects to their final destination, their
fully-developed state. A baby achieves its final point of development
and embodies its predestined idea/form (hence reaches en-erg-ia) once
it becomes an adult. So does the wood achieve the predetermined form
of its architect once it fully becomes a table. For Heidegger, being
as an open space of objects that are interpreted as resources for
human purposes is always imperfect. Even though we may have achieved
a synthesis of objects + meanings, the synthesis could be dissembled
and assembled anew.

If
Heidegger's teleology is always about pursuing and never fully
arriving, unlike Aristotle's where the goals of development reach their
final fulfillment, this point of divergence is explicable by the vast
difference in their projects. In Aristotle's exploration of beings, a predetermined goal-oriented development of living creatures and
material objects does indeed succeed in reaching its final goal.
(Both plants and cats grow to take their expected adult form.)
But in Heidegger's quest of understanding the "being" of things in
a human world, their being being none other than how they become
intelligible and take on meaning, how they "appear" and "shine forth"
to humans, the meaning/significance of things can never achieve a
final form/state and become frozen. Dasein, "being there" as translated
from German, is the human process of taking the world as a canvas that you paint meaning upon. For Heidegger, a person is naturally driven
to link objects to his sense of purpose. Once he mediates objects via
a context of meaning and creates a meaningful space, eventually he
comes to see his role in aligning things to a particular purpose, to
see it as the reason that there is any meaning at all as opposed to
none. If there's any impact Heidegger may have wanted to have upon
the history of the philosophy, it was perhaps to replace the question
"what exists in the world" with the questions of "What
do I take these things to be and why do I conceive of them as such
and others yet differently?” and “Why do they appear to me in a
certain way at a certain moment and in a different way at another?"